Ed Silverman (Pharmalot, September 26th, 2008) writes. “…five warning letters were sent yesterday by the agency (FDA) to different drugmakers for incomplete, false or misleading promotional materials for ADHD meds.” “… the FDA says the drugmakers variously omitted material facts; minimized important risks; overstated efficacy or made unsubstantiated claims.” “Manufacturers will always try to go right to the limit in making their promotional claims to doctors, and doctors tend to follow their claims,” said Larry Diller, a behavioral pediatrician in Walnut Creek, California, who says the hyperactivity medications are overused though he prescribes them for some patients. “When claims are overstated, there is both over-prescribing and mis-prescribing and in the end children get hurt,” Diller said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg News, September 26, 2008.”

The glaring omission here is that ADHD has never been proved to be a disease (throughout medicine, disease = physical abnormality-gross, microscopic, or chemical). Shown no proof of an abnormality, the Panel of the 1998 Consensus Conference on ADHD could only conclude ” …we do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD, and there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction.” Carey reporting on “Is ADHD a Valid Disorder?” concluded: “What is…described as ADHD in the United States appears to be a set of normal behavioral variations…” Nor has ADHD or any other psychiatric diagnosis/ “disorder” been proved since to be a bona fide disease, having, as it must, a confirmatory physical abnormality. This being the case, all research and all treatment predicated upon the presumption that ADHD is an abnormality/disease is false. For this reason what we have today is not “mis-diagnosis” and “over-prescribing” but a total, one hundred percent fraud. No child diagnosed with “ADHD” is demonstrably abnormal/diseased. Their first and only abnormality is the intoxication with amphetamines and other psychotropic drugs that invariably follow the “diagnosis” of ADHD.

Lawrence Diller, quoted above, is widely viewed as a voice of moderation when it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of this “disorder” that does not exist. On page 7 of his book Running on Ritalin: Should I Medicate My Child? Diller writes: “Before 1990 I needed perhaps one pad of a hundred forms every nine months; by 1997 I realized it was one every three months,” or approximately 400 Ritalin prescriptions a year, hardly “moderate” given that no such disease exists-that the children are normal to begin with.